Poem-A-Day: The Long Deployment by Jehanne Dubrow

December 20, 2013 The Long Deployment by Jehanne Dubrow     For weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet  and pillow. I lift a blanket to my face.  There's bitter incense paired with something sweet,  like sandalwood left sitting in the heat or cardamom rubbed on a piece of lace.  For weeks, I breathe his body. In the sheet I smell anise, the musk that we secrete with longing, leather and moss. I find a trace  of bitter incense paired with something sweet.  Am I imagining the wet scent of peat and cedar, oud, impossible to erase?  For weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet--  crushed pepper--although perhaps discreet,  difficult for someone else to place.  There's bitter incense paired with something sweet. With each deployment I become an aesthete  of smoke and oak. Patchouli fills the space  for weeks. I breathe his body in the sheet until he starts to fade, made incomplete,  a bottle almost empty in its case. There's bitter incense paired with something sweet.  And then he's gone. Not even the conceit  of him remains, not the resinous base. For weeks, I breathed his body in the sheet. He was bitter incense paired with something sweet.        Copyright © 2013 by Jehanne Dubrow. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem "I'm coediting an anthology of poems, The Book of Scented Things, that engages with perfumes. Each of the 100 contributors received an individually selected vial of scent and wrote a poem in response. I decided to give myself the same prompt. One of my husband's fragrances allowed me to write about the felt loneliness of a military deployment. The poem is an exploded villanelle that continues, perhaps a little longer than it should; in my experience as a military spouse, deployments too often feel as if they are a series of maddening refrains." --Jehanne Dubrow Most Recent Book by Dubrow Red Army Red (Northwestern University Press, 2012)   Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.    Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four books of poems, including Red Army Red (Northwestern University Press, 2012). She is the director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House and an assistant professor of creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  Related Poems The War After the War  by Debora Greger  Dear Lonely Animal, by Oni Buchanan  Suburban by Michael Blumenthal  __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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